Prof. Dr. John Perry

Reference, Identity and Information

In his 1961 dissertation Referential Opacity and Modal Logic[1] , and in a number of other places, Dagfinn Føllesdal has argued that to understand the role that names and other referring expressions play in language, we have to see them as dedicated to keeping track of objects through changes in properties, and that this fact needs to guide our treatment of identity and reference in the case of modal logic and other constructions that give rise to opacity, such as statements about causation and propositional attitudes.
In this paper I hope to do some and perhaps all of the following:
1. Explain the utility of our concepts of natural objects, such as material objects and persons, by seeing them as ways of handling information structures, in the sense of Israel and Perry, "Information and Architecture."[2]
2. Show how our concepts of natural objects, so conceived, support Føllesdal's account.
3. Relate this to the concept of anticipation in Husserl. 4. Explore the difficulties posed by (apparent?) "fission" and "fusion" of objects across times and worlds within this framework.
[1] New York: Routledge, 2004
[2] In Situation Theory and Its Applications, vol. 2, edited by Jon Barwise, Jean Mark Gawron, Gordon Plotkin and Syun Tutiya. Stanford University: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1991, 147-160